How to Recolor
I have heard on the message board circle several times that people do not know how to recolor or that they are not confident in their recoloring skills. I thought a small tutorial would help to take some of the guess work out of recoloring. First of all to make sure you have something to practice on, I have made a flower for you to use. This is an item made for you to recolor. While is it also possible to recolor something that is already a specific color, when learning to recolor, it helps to start with something that was designed to be recolored. You may download this flower to recolor here:
| First, lets look at this item to be recolored so we can get a general idea of what recoloring is all about. This was made with a light grey color to it in order to put the highlights and shadows in the image. If you find an image that will not let you work with it, check to be sure it is in the right color mode. Look under Image>Mode and see what is checked. Sometimes it might be Grayscale and that won't work for us. We need the Image Mode of RGB. |  |
| Now, lets choose a color. Pick the color you want to change the flower to and set it as your foreground color. For the sake of these lesson I chose #3490a2 a pretty aqua color, not too dark, but not too light. |  |
| Now, go to Image>Adjustments>Hue Saturation |  |
| The Hue/Saturation menu has three main options that are presented with sliders. But, THE FIRST THING TO DO IS: check the box that says Colorize. Make sure the Preview box is checked also. Position the box so you can see the item you are recoloring and you will see that it has taken on a tint of the color you have chosen for your foreground. |  |
By moving the sliders of Hue, Saturation and Lightness back and forth you can find the color that is pleasing to you.
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| For the above flower, I did not move the sliders any at all. I just checked the colorize box. | The flower above was made by checking the colorize box and moving the Saturation slider to 50 and the lightness slider to a negative 25 |
| By playing with the sliders you can find a number of different colors to make your flower. If you move the hue slider, it will change the color from aqua to other hues. | |
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| Just remember to always check the colorize box. Also, choosing your color before opening the Hue/Saturation menu will help a lot. | |
| Now, lets try this recoloring on something that is not meant to be recolored. Recoloring elements and paper will increase the useability of your stash tremendously. | |
| I chose a nice green plaid that I want to recolor. This paper will be included in the download with the flower to recolor. But, to recolor this plaid, I DID NOT CHECK THE COLORIZE. For this, we want to give it a color wash instead of changing the colors all together. Open it up and start to play with the Hue/Saturation settings and you will see what I mean. Here are the color variations I was able to make with this paper. | |
The original - I did not change anything in this image
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I moved the Hue slider to around a postive 133 and moved the saturation slider to around a plus 21
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I moved the Hue Slider to around minus 30 to get these colors and I left the other sliders alone.
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I moved the Hue slider to around a minus 133 and left the other sliders alone to get these colors.
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